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Tutorials
Guide: Install openiboot and Android on a 1st generation iPod Touch
Jun 12th
This guide will show you, in great detail, how to install both openiboot and Android on a 1st Generation iPod Touch. The video is below, it is best to watch this in full screen to see the fine details of the commands. The following files are required:
- uberamd_idroid_v1.zip
- iPod Touch 1G Firmware 3.1.2
- Blackra1n (click the Apple image)
- Mac OS X Snow Leopard (untested on Leopard but it will likely work)
- iPod Touch 1G
- About an hour of time
Cisco AnyConnect in Ubuntu & Fedora – Fixing it the Easy way
Jun 3rd
Cisco AnyConnect fails to properly connect under Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora were tested) due to the following reason:
connection attempt has failed due to a server certificate problem
Eventually I found a fix for it, and while it worked it was a slight pain in the ass as it required you to download and extract firefox from Mozilla.com, pull files from the archive, copy them, and create softlinks. I created a simple script (and a folder that contains the needed files) that will resolve this issue in no time flat. Simply:
- Download the archive
- Extract the archive: tar -xvzf cisco_anyconnect_fix.tar.gz
- Go into the newly created folder: cd cisco_anyconnect_fix
- Execute the script as root: sudo anyconnect_fix.sh
- Connect to VPN as normal
I hope this works for you, I did test it in Ubuntu 10.04 & Fedora 13 with success. There is a check that will install via yum or aptitude the needed libraries.
Give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues.
Download (1MB): cisco_anyconnect_fix.tar.gz
Hide the Dock icon for Tweetie – Mac
Mar 10th
Tweetie for Mac is certainly one of the best Twitter applications available, however it is lacking in one area: hiding the dock icon. Tweetie uses a Dock and menubar icon which is abnormal for many applications, usually they just use one or the other. Fear not, hiding the Dock icon and keeping the menubar icon is just a few quick steps away.
- Quit Tweetie if you have it running
- Go to your Applications folder using Finder
- Right click on the Tweetie application and select “Show Package Contents”
- Double click the Contents folder to go into it
- Double click on the Info.plist file to open it in TextEdit
- Under the <dict> tag add the following lines:
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string> - Save, quit TextEdit, launch Tweetie again, and enjoy!
Here is a sample of what the top of your Info.plist file should look like with the edited lines:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>
Some common issues:
Q: Oh no, I can’t authenticate and my tweets aren’t showing up anymore?!
A: Fear not, open tweetie up, Press “Command + ,” to open preferences, navigate to Accounts, remove your user account and add it again. Problem solved. Strange bug, I know.
Q: Um… the Menubar icon is gone as well as the dock icon!
A: Try replacing LSUIElement with NSUIElement in your info.plist file.
Q: But something else went wrong…
A: Hit me up on twitter then @uberamd and I will help you.
Disable GZIP Image Compression in FOG for Faster Image Creation
Jan 14th
Recently I changed the software the imaging server at work uses from Clonezilla to FOG. There were many reasons for the change such as a better web interface, image deployment queue, etc however one of the main things I was looking forward to was storage nodes which allows for distribution of images across multiple servers to extend storage.
Deploying the FOG server was easy enough, however one of the first things I noticed was that image creation (uploading a new image to the server) was incredibly slow in comparison to image deployment. Image creation would take nearly 2 hours while image deployment would take about 25 minutes. This frustrated me to no end as we were doing this over gigabit and it wasn’t utilizing hardly any of the pipe on image creation. A quick glance at the screen told me why: FOG automatically assumes you want to GZIP the image. This means a smaller image, but a drastically increased image creation time since the system needs to compress the data it is sending.
I searched high and low through the config files for a way to disable GZIP compression, but found nothing. Eventually I figured out how to disable the compression, however doing so was not well documented at all. Enter this post which will hopefully help others solve the same problem I ran into.
Simply follow these steps (type these commands in your Linux terminal, you may need to be root or sudo to run some of these):
cp /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tmp/init.gz
cd /tmp
gunzip init.gz
mkdir tmpMnt
mount -o loop /tmp/init /tmp/tmpMnt
Now using your favorite linux command line editor open the file /tmp/tmpMnt/bin/fog and find and replace all instances of -z1 with -z0. To do that with VIM do the following:
vim /tmp/tmpMnt/bin/fog
:%s/z1/z0/
:wq
Once you have replaced all -z1 with -z0 we need to recompress and replace your old init.gz file:
cd /tmp
umount /tmp/tmpMnt
gzip -9 init
cp /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz.old
cp -f init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz
Thats it. Now you have disabled compression upon image creation and you should notice a VERY large drop in image creation time! FOG does provide a script that assists in editing the init.gz file, HOWEVER the script requires you to have Nautilus installed (aka GNOME) and how many people really run a GUI on a server? Not many.
Recursive Unrar Script for Windows
Aug 5th
This script, as well as similar scripts can be found on the interwebs but I tend to keep losing the pages that have it. So for my own archival reasons, as well as making it a little easier for others to find, here it is.
This script uses winrar to recursively extract rar archives. This is very useful if you download seasons of shows and don’t want to extract each episode one by one.
Step 1: Open up the Windows Command Prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) or (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt)
Step 2: Change to the directory containing the folders for the episodes you want to extract. For example:
cd "\Users\Steve\Downloads\My Favorite Show - Seasons 1-6\My Show - Season 1"
Step 3: Now that we are in the folder containing all the sub-folders to each episode for your show, type in the following command to extract all of the episodes:
for /R %i IN (.) do "c:\Program Files\WinRAR\Rar.exe" x "%i/*.rar"
That command is a recursive for loop that looks for .rar files in each folder and extracts them, placing the extracted file in your current folder. If all goes well you will have every episode in your current folder, extracted and ready to watch!
Note: If you installed the 32-bit WinRAR and are running 64-bit windows your command will look like this:
for /R %i IN (.) do "c:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR\Rar.exe" x "%i/*.rar"
It’s that simple.
How to disable/enable the OS X Leopard 3D Dock
Mar 20th
Here is a quick video tutorial on how to enable and disable the OS X 3D dock (leopard only). There isn’t sound, I don’t talk on videos, however just follow along with the text.
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Bypass Torrent File Network Filters
Mar 20th
Many Universities, workplaces, etc are starting to take action against the use of torrent files. You can always change ports so port blocking is a worthless use of network time. However, places have started to restrict the ability to download files ending in the .torrent extension. This complicates things immensely.
Take for example a situation I encountered. On the Ubuntu 7.10 release date it was nearly impossible to find a server to download the ISO from as they were all getting hammered with requests. The solution many servers displayed was ‘download via a torrent’. When I tried that on my university network, I encountered the problem, I couldn’t download the .torrent file. This was annoying, as the University states that using the network to download and seed legal torrents is allowed. How did I get passed this? Using a simple php script I coded up, that can be found at http://steve.blogme.us/bypass.php
The script simply takes the URL to the .torrent file, saves it on the local server as a text file, and allows you to then download it, then all you need to do is change the extension to .torrent and load it up in the torrent client. It is that simple, and it works! Enjoy.
Ubuntu LLMP (Linux Lighttpd MySQL PHP) with PHPMyAdmin and Cacti – Tutorial
Dec 12th
This guide will show you (yes show, it has pictures) how to configure a standard Ubuntu 7.10 install to act as a LLMP (Linux Lighttpd MySQL PHP) server. I will also show you how to install the Cacti statistics and server status software package.
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